Two new editions

1- Cambridge University Press has published a paperback edition of Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel written by Monica Feinberg Cohen, originally published in 1998.

Much attention has recently been given by scholars to the widening of the gender gap in the nineteenth century and the concept of separate spheres. Testing such constructions, and questioning the stereotypes associated withC Victorian domesticity, Monica F. Cohen offers new readings of narratives by Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Eden, Gaskell, Oliphant and Reade to show how domestic work, the most feminine of all activities, gained much of its social credibility by positioning itself in relation to the emergent professions. By exploring how novels cast the Victorian conception of female morality into the vocabulary of nineteenth-century professionalism, Cohen traces the ways in which women sought identity and privilege within a professionalised culture, and revises our understanding of Victorian domestic ideology.

Chapter 2, "Homesick: the domestic interiors of Villette" is the one focused on Charlotte's novel.

If you are interested in reading this chapter, you can use http://print.google.com

2- Victoriana. Histories, Fictions, Criticism, a collection of essays by Cora Kaplan, has been reissued by the Edinburgh University Press this October (it seems that the book was first published in 2001, but there's some confusion about this point) in paperback and hardback editions.

"Victoriana" now includes an astonishing range of objects, reproductions, histories, fictions, adaptations, pastiches and parodies that represent the recycling and rewriting of the Victorian past in the second half of the 20th century. This text considers this phenomenon and its meaning.;In this series of essays, Cora Kaplan reflects on our peculiar and enduring fascination with things Victorian, ranging from Sanderson's "William Morris" fabrics to feminism's obsession with Brontë's "Jane Eyre". Two further essays, one on class, one on Raymond Williams and the 1840s ask how 20th-century critics, themselves embedded in the legacy of Victorian social and sexual politics, have negotiated 19th-century categories of difference.;"Victoriana" has its own temporality in the present. Three further essays focus respectively on fiction, film and biography from the 1980s and 90s, taking in A.S. Byatt's "Possession", David Lodge's "Nice Work", Jane Campion's "The Piano" and Peter Ackroyd's "Dickens". They all explore the simultaneous critique of and nostalgia for 19th-century narrative forms and the society and culture that engendered them.

Categories: Books, Scholar, Victorian_Era, Jane_Eyre, Charlotte_Brontë